Man of Two Worlds by Frank Herbert
Lutt Hanson, Jr., was becoming aware of the merging.
Who are you? How did you get into my mind?
It was a soundless voice but it roared in Ryll’s awareness.
What are you doing to me? Get out! Get out!
Ryll formed a responsive thought, trying to make it as soothing as possible. But overtones of panic were unavoidable.
I can’t get out. That would kill both of us.
The human responded with more panic and tried to take control of their mutual body.
This is my body and I want you out of it!
Only a small part of this body is yours. Most of it is mine. I’m trying to save us both.
You’re lying!
Ryll allowed a memory vision of the moments before fleshly merging to flow into common awareness. He carefully controlled what was shared but made it appear uncensored, astonished at his sudden ability to dissemble.
The human’s response was predictable.
My God! Is that me? Oh . . . yes. The back of my head was crushed! Nobody could have survived that. I must’ve been dying.
We both were dying. There was enough flesh to save us but only in one body.
Can’t we separate?
There may be a way but it will take time and facilities you don’t yet possess.
Who are you?
I am a Dreen Far Voyager.
That was a lie but the human could not know, could not acquire any of Ryll’s memories unless Ryll chose to share them.
What’s a Dreen?
I’ll explain later. What was your ship doing in my emergent space? You caused the accident.
No response from the Earther.
Ryll sensed advantage and pressed it.
Didn’t you know an Excursion Ship of a Far Voyager might come out there?
The human tried to change the subject. What’s this language we’re using and how come I understand it?
This is the Dreenor language. Habiba’s language. When we merged, some of my language facility became available to you.
Why do you say I caused the accident?
You entered emergent space without proper warning.
I was testing my new ship. Definitely defensive.
Well, your companion is dead and both of our ships are total disasters. Who are these people rescuing us?
Zone Patrol. I wasn’t authorized in their perimeter and there’s going to be hell to pay. It’s into the clink for sure, no matter who I am.
Ryll allowed himself a secret thought: Zone Patrol! The ones who held captive Dreens!
He assumed his most persuasive personality. I have a suggestion, Lutt. May I call you Lutt?
Sure, but what do I call you?
My name is Ryll. I suggest you take over control of our body and answer the Zone Patrol’s question. I suggest you not tell them about me.
Silence, then: Yeah. They’d think I was nuts unless . . . Say! What’s our body look like?
Like you but slightly larger than before the accident. More massive.
Ryll felt the litter being lowered to a flat surface and opened his eyes. He sensed Lutt reaching for dominance in their mutual flesh. Vision blurry—vague movement of armored figures, a gray bulkhead.
A faceplate came into view.
“He’s coming around. Should I give him a shot?”
“Hold it. This deck will shake if that fuel blows.”
As though the words created the effect, red brightness erased the shadows. There was the thumping sound of a muffled explosion. Ryll bounced in a wash of heat.
“Jeeedarussi!” It was a voice close to his ear.
The commanding voice boomed out: “Get the fire control team in there or we’ll lose the whole thing!”
Ryll heard the movement of many armored humans but could not see them because someone without armor bent close, blocking his view. Ryll saw a wide, heavy head with short hair. Hands probed and tested his new body. Female by the voice and briskly professional.
“We’ll ’ray him but there don’t appear to be any broken bones.”
“If that isn’t fool luck I never heard of it. Right next to a dead one, too.”
That was a masculine voice from one side.
“His lapel tag says Lutt Hanson, Jr.,” the woman said.
The man spoke sharply. “Hanson? This is old L.H.’s kid! I’d better call in.”
Ryll still felt the gropings of Lutt Junior trying to take over control of their body. Very tentative and wary, like an insect crawling along his nerves. The human lacked Dreen experience in the mental acceptance of storytelling.
There came the sound of a click and a humming buzz.
Ryll thought: My human head moves on a supple neck. He turned his head toward the sound but could not bring the man into view. The voice was clear, though.
“Sergeant Renner here, sir. We’re at the crash site. One survivor with an identity label saying he’s Lutt Hanson, Jr.”
Silence, then: “No, sir. Fuel spilled and exploded. There are no other survivors.”
Ryll focused on a circular crest adorning an arm of the woman bending over him. He filled out the shared memory with an assimilated Dreen Storyteller account.
Zone Patrol. This is the dangerous, all-encompassing United States security force—a unification of their previous military agencies.
Sergeant Renner spoke: “There was only one other body, sir, and we couldn’t get it out.”
More silence, then: “Very well, sir. Will comply.”
I really messed up, Ryll thought.
He closed his eyes and began sorting through newly acquired memories.
What a jumble! Important data, though. The Earther ship employed a primitive form of Dreen drive. We collided because the crude thing inherently homed on the signal of my incoming ship. Stupid! Stupid!
What happened to Patricia? Is my perfect ship destroyed forever?
Why, oh why did I take that ship?
Lutt Junior assumed command of their flesh and Ryll sank into his own thoughts with a sense of relief.
In school they had said the Dreen partner in this amalgam might have difficulty withdrawing completely but could be dominant by choice, taking over muscle and nerve control at any time. That was reassuring.
He felt the litter being lifted and carried somewhere.
Patricia, what is happening to you?
It had been so easy to take the ship. Too easy. The chief monitor at the Flat during Ryll’s sixteenth year out of seedhouse, an Eminence named Prosik, had shown flexions and tremblings characteristic of bazeel addiction. Prosik had other defects, all of them adding up to sufficient reason for his never having risen above the position of Eminence, nineteenth from the bottom of Habiba’s fifty-seven social varieties. He often slept during guard duty and even when awake accompanied the curious child into the ship for play at being a Storyteller.
If he hadn’t been asleep I never would have acquired the flight-simulation manuals.
Despite the present mess, Ryll still felt proud of the way he had taken the ship. He had raised the impossible-to-idmage bazeel in a small experimental horticultural garden off his bedroom, hiding the prohibited plant under broad-leaved herbs. His parents, admiring the garden, never suspected.
Ryll had tried the bazeel once and awakened the next morning with a severe brainache and little memory of its effect except for vague visions of extruding all four legs and falling asleep while counting them over and over.
Periodically, Ryll presented small stems of bazeel to Prosik and, one day, gave the Eminence a large frond of the drug “to thank you for letting me play in the beautiful ship.”
Shortly after consuming the bazeel, Prosik’s horn-tool extension sank into the brown mass of his body until it lay almost buried there and the chief monitor was a comatose lump of protoplasm. He did not stir as Ryll crept into the ship, gaze fixed on the icy yellow light shining from the control room.
At last! He was in a Storyteller’s sanctum and he possessed the
Around Ryll lay an ovoid enclosure seven times his height and so wide even his longest extensions could not span it. He touched the first command plate and a silver-yellow glow filled the space with an exciting lambent radiance.
Ryll stared at the controls. This was the light that signaled life-creating forces.
So I have the necessary powers.
One could never be sure until touching that plate in the command space and this had been forbidden to a mere child.
For a moment he felt fearful of the life patterns that might emerge from this place and he dawdled while sealing the external hatches.
Hesitation passed. He formed the proper pseudopod, touched the proper plates in proper sequence and exactly as the flight simulator had predicted, he found himself and the ship in the infinite Spirals of tangled space.
Elation filled him.
I’ve done it!
Sensors displayed what lay outside—the substance of creation bathed in a light very like that within the Storyteller sanctum. Out there stood the most exciting mystery of all—the raw material from which Dreen idmaging produced new places and new life. He had touched the control plate and filled his mind with awareness of the Spirals. Now . . . now he could idmage something important!
And no other Dreen could track him. Memory and the ship systems held the coordinates to guide his return. Dreenor was not lost to him; he was lost to Dreenor.
Ryll sat in the Storyteller harness, swinging at the focal center of command and he felt very much the maker of a reality dream, that marvelous precursor to idmages. That was the moment the ship chose to shock him.
“You will call me Patricia of the female gender.”
Ryll jumped. Nothing in his education had prepared him for the candor and adjustment capabilities apparent in the voice of this . . . this artifact. He had never heard of a ship initiating conversation.
“That’s interesting,” he managed. “Why should I call you Po . . . Putrushua?”
“Patricia!” she corrected him. “You will call me Patricia because it is my name and we are going to a place where that is a common appellation.”
“But I want to go through the Spirals and—”
“I am ordered to one destination and cannot disobey.”
“My name is Ryll and you will—”
“I observe that you are quite immature and will require careful supervision. It is difficult to compute why you were assigned this mission. Perhaps you are expendable. That fits the rationale of my task.”
“Answer my question!”
Silence.
“Please tell my why we have only one destination.”
“I am a Reserved Inspection Ship devised to erase an idmage.”
Ryll’s body collapsed into a hard ball, his horn tool pointed at the source of the ship’s voice above him on the plate wall. He knew this posture. Defensive reflex.
Slowly, Ryll formed his voice orifice and did the only thing left to him. He confessed.
“Interesting,” Patricia said. “I am incapable of turning back from this mission and you are the only Dreen available to make the life and death decision.”
“Why didn’t Prosik warn me what kind of ship you are?”
“Prosik is only an Eminence. He will, of course, be severely punished. What they will do to you must be left to conjecture.”
“They know where we’re going and they’ll come for me, won’t they?”
It was more statement than question.
“They will follow at a much slower pace. I was devised for the swift emergency erasure of a particular creation should a Storyteller command it.”
Erasure!
That word again, and Ryll thought of what it meant—a planet and its life gone forever, the tangible evidence of a Storyteller’s creative idmaging . . . everything gone and never to recur. Ryll’s horn tool pulsed in and out with distress.
“But why would . . . I mean, if . . .”
Ryll could not bring himself to say it. The idea was horrible beyond anything he had ever considered.
Harsh information, indeed!
“The creatures of this world pose a potential threat to every idmaged creation the Dreens have ever made.”
That was worse!
Ryll began to see the extremis behind creation of this ship. Another aspect of the problem occurred to him.
“You mean I may have to decide on . . . I may have to order the . . .”
He still could not say the word.
“You are Dreen and you may have to command it. If you give the order, I must obey.”
Then she gave him the full dose of harsh information.
Loneliness enfolded Ryll. Accounts from school and Storyteller assimilations had not prepared him for this. He was cut off from security, from things known and expected.
He might never return to Dreenor. That was where all Dreens conveyed their tales and replenished themselves.
“Tapping into the past,” Habiba called it.
Even if he survived the . . . the . . .
Damn Habiba!
“Return or die,” Habiba often said.
And she had the long history of Dreen tragedies on her side.
I have nine Dreenyears at most.
Dreens who failed to return within that limit had been found dead in distant places. Folk wisdom said all Dreens must share their story experiences to survive, that Dreenor was a storehouse of mystical regeneration, enabling Dreens to live forever. This was believed despite infrequent accidental deaths on Dreenor and elsewhere.
Return or die.
Ryll thought he might rather die than take this kind of story home to Dreenor. Who could possibly admit him into the Junior Storytellers after he had . . . had . . . had . . . done what Patricia said?
That might be a useless fear, too. Even though disguised as an Earther, he was now another Dreen captive in the hands of the dreaded Zone Patrol.
***
There will always be newspapers, always some crusty old publisher, or a young publisher with crusty old ideas, who refuses to let go of the past. I respect the past, the smoke-filled, bustling news offices and all that, but I’m not a sentimental person. We create a better future if we stay in touch with our past, but I feel damned good about my electronic newspaper. It’s my base and conduit for creativity. No details yet, but I’m about to unleash a technological breakthrough in this industry. And a related, but even more astounding development will follow shortly.
—Lutt Hanson, Jr., an interview in his Seattle Enquirer
Someone’s moving my arms, my legs and my head and controlling where I look.
These were panic thoughts in Lutt’s awareness. Through the round lenses of his spectacles, he saw foggy human shapes. He heard the rattle of keys and clanking metal. There were men walking around him—at front, back and both sides.
I stumbled and something took over my body.
An alien force held him upright and walking steadily.
“I am Ryll, son of Jongleur, the Chief Storyteller.”
That was hearing voices in his head—madness.
I was in my ship, the Vortraveler, Lutt thought. I said something to Drich Baker, my engineer and copilot. What did I say?
Memory provided no answer. He knew there had been a blackout. It had erased part of his mind.
He took a familiar mental course then, recalling the day before boarding the Vortraveler.
If I exercise the brain muscles, go through everything up to the blackout, maybe I’ll remember.
He had been in the family-owned Seattle Enquirer Building. That much he remembered. A gray, seventeen-story structure, the building housed the plant of an electronic newspaper.
Only a tax writeoff in Father’s mind.
Running the family’s Newspaper Division gave Lutt the sense that the Enquirer was much more than “a fixture of antiquated technology,” as his father called it.
Lutt recalled arguing with old L.H. i
“Stop wasting time on that damn vorspiral crap! You’re making us a laughingstock, predicting ‘astounding developments’ and ‘technological breakthroughs’ that’ll never happen!”
“Dammit, Father, you think things will never happen just because you don’t want them to happen!”
“Son, you’re sounding more and more like that crazy brother of your mother’s. You keep on this way and you’ll wind up like your Uncle Dudley!”
Lutt stared at his father. For years, the cloud of some violent quarrel between the two men had hung over the family. And now the old man broke his own rule against mentioning Uncle Dudley.
“Just how did Uncle Dudley wind up?” Lutt asked, almost choking on the forbidden name.
“I hope what they say is true—that he disappeared on Venus! He deserved to get his ass fried!”
Seeing the signs of increasing rage in his father, Lutt changed the subject but that only led them back into the fight about the Seattle Enquirer, vorspirals and Lutt’s future in Hanson Industries.
It was a continuing conflict with predictable reactions on both sides.
But L.H. doesn’t know what Drich and I have already achieved.
Drich!
The voice in his mind said Drich was dead. And there was that brief memory—his own body with a crushed skull.
Was that really me?
Lutt cast off those thoughts.
Hallucinations. The Zone Patrol doctor gave me a shot. That’s what’s causing me to feel this way.
Vorspiral communications technology! That would win the argument with Father. The ability to send almost instantaneous messages across millions of kilometers of space—transmissions faster and clearer than anything in history.
Just a little more testing and development, some careful publicity, and it surely would be of interest to the military and even to other news services.
But old L.H. wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t bend from his rigid ways.
We’ll call it Vorspiral News Service—VNS.
And the possibility—no! the probability!—loomed before him of extremely rapid travel across interstellar space. Theory said there were vorspirals to link any place in the universe with any other place. The speed of this travel still had to be tested, but he knew it would be very fast.